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Intercom is the AI Customer Service company on a mission to help businesses provide incredible customer experiences. Our AI agent Fin, the most advanced customer service AI agent on the market, lets businesses deliver always-on, impeccable customer service and ultimately transform their customer experiences for the better. Fin can also be combined with our Helpdesk to become a complete solution called the Intercom Customer Service Suite, which provides AI enhanced support for the more complex or high touch queries that require a human agent. Founded in 2011 and trusted by nearly 30,000 global businesses, Intercom is setting the new standard for customer service.
Rails has been at Intercom’s core since day one. Starting on Rails 3.0.3, the codebase has grown into a two-million-line majestic monolith that stays current through continuous upgrades.
Intercom follows trunk-based development. Engineers open small PRs and merge to main throughout the day. On each PR, 100k+ tests are run with a P75 completion of six minutes. Each deployment reruns the full test suite along with staging and pre-production smoke tests in parallel. When every check passes, thousands of hosts pull the new build and restart Rails in batches. End-to-end deployment completes with P75 under twelve minutes. Rollback is even faster, about two minutes, by pointing each host to the previous release and restarting Rails.
At peak, Intercom serves 150k HTTPS requests per second and 50k background job requests. That drives more than two million SQL calls and twenty million cache hits per second.
Rails helps Intercom keep the infrastructure simple, letting their teams innovate faster. Doubling request volume would simply require adding more hosts.
In 2022, Company became a founding Core member of the Rails Foundation.
At Intercom, we believe in building world-class customer service experiences, and Rails has been at the heart of that journey from day one.
Ryan Sherlock Director of Engineering
For more than a decade, it has let us move fast, scale smoothly, and power innovations like Fin, our AI agent that resolves customer queries at scale. Rails now supports millions of conversations every day, and our engineers stay happy and productive thanks to a framework built for humans.
Supporting the Rails Foundation is our way of ensuring Rails continues to evolve so the next generation of companies can grow from “hello world” to IPO.
London Ruby User Group
Ruby Ireland
Rails World Sponsor